Al Gore is a Loser ‘s requiem for a lightweight

Al Gore is a loser. This is what the history books will bare out after the obligatory screeching dies down. Those who imagined a less than dramatic kicking-and-screaming exit by a man so patently damaged by a lifetime in Washington politics as to become inhuman were sadly mistaken. The vice president did not go quietly, but he is gone for now, and don’t think those of us in the know think he’s going anywhere far. Most think he’ll have plenty to say, but it will not be from a position of authority and for now that is enough for me.

There was a time, not long ago, that I was frozen with fear over the prospect of an Albert Gore jr. presidency. My disdain for him had grown over the years from irritation to abhorrence. The moment his smug pout started spewing righteous babble at Frank Zappa during his wife’s First Amendment lynching disguised as “parental concern” to the savage dismantling of Bill Bradley’s considerable integrity, Gore’s enemy status reached dangerous levels in the Putnam Bunker. But as Election Day approached it quickly accelerated into the kind of mind-numbing fear from which I am only now recovering.

The Bradley people were entertained by my many letters warning them to rile Dollar Bill into a kill-frenzy before facing Gore, but they didn’t laugh for long. And the more the doomed phalanx of Bush staffers e-mailed me one fuck-up after the other from the campaign trail and the poll numbers tightened; I began to envision the horrifying possibility that Gore might actually win.

After throwing together post-primary notes for a column I entitled “Why George W. Bush Can’t Win In November” (Aq.3/8/00) the carcass of John McCain was hardly cold and Junior had leaned so far right only circus freaks could vote for him with a clear conscience. But I’m man enough to admit I thought that McCain was the last line of defense against Gore. And I’m man enough to sheepishly admit I was convinced that if there were true evil in politics, not just stupidity, mediocrity and petty, partisan greed, it took horrifying shape in Al Gore’s heart.

Evidence was mounting daily. There were those Joseph Lieberman fascist diatribes about “a vote for Gore is a vote for God” and the “battle between good and evil” masquerading as Bible-induced epiphanies coupled with the appointment of another wretched Democratic Party goon like William Daly hatched from the militant loins of his deranged father to run the campaign. Gore was looking eerily like a young Richard Nixon slandering Helen Gahagan Douglas in an all-hell damn-the-torpedoes stump. During these dark hours many of my sources have solid, written evidence of my consistent assassination rants. The most damning of these was an e-mail note I sent to Alec Baldwin:

I am sorry to hear of your departure to land’s unknown should Junior win this thing, but your leaving the country is small pittance when you consider that I may have to kill Al Gore should he win, and then your politics would force you to keep me from lethal injection. I implore you now to pray to whatever god you subscribe that Gore loses for his sake and the sake of any movement to keep slugs like me from systematic death.

But that was silly talk from a wounded journalist angered that cheap used-car peddlers represented anything important This might have a sent a weaker man careening toward total mental breakdown, but I had to remind myself of several adages echoed in this space about the litany of monsters that have called themselves president. And even though Gore could very well have been my own personal demon, it was time to get perspective.

Al Gore was never truly evil. He is just terribly flawed, instinctively insincere and severely overrated as a danger to anything binding. Even my off-hand tavern references to Gore as Nixon fell far short of the truth. Nixon held true to his beliefs that everyone but himself knew what the hell was good for the country. Gore began this way, but ended up a tired parody of something he previously thought was important. But, alas, he is just a loser, and not all the lawyers, decrying pundits; sign-waving miscreants or Jesse Jackson speeches can change that. Forgive me for deriving a soothing comfort in those words, the same wash of supreme joy I experience every time that mortally satanic creature, Bud Selig hands George Steinbrenner a World Series Trophy, but I do.

There were nights lately that my dream of penning a vicious attack on Gore had reached orgasmic proportions, but most dreams die hard and orgasms don’t last. These are the harsh realities of life, like the fact that Al Gore is nothing more than Walter Mondale with a grudge. In retrospect his talk of “winning the popular vote” and “correct hand counts” were so completely mad and pathetic that many of his staff was reduced to weeping trolls in its wake. Even the confused Supreme Court was too embarrassed to render a sane decision on the thing. No one with half a brain believes this man had won anything, because there are no consolation prizes for losers in politics and moral victories are spin placebos for anyone harboring hopes to occupy the oval office.

But at least Mondale had to admit to total, humiliating defeat. His trouncing was as historical as it was gruesome. Al Gore’s loss was so excruciatingly close to victory four or five different times that you can be assured that as you read this he is staring into space thinking about what-might-have-been, the overt behavior of the loser.

George W. Bush is a dumb ass and will no doubt be a useless leader in the fumes of this barely legal victory, but he won. Al Gore lost. To write that is divinely real, like Fitzgerald’s “high white note.” His stupidity notwithstanding, Bush will forever stand as the symbol of a two-party system joke rendered on a populace sure that it spits out the worst humanity can offer. But he is not Al Gore. He lost.